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Tracking traffic from an online/iPad newspaper

The client has had advertising placed in the iPad app version of major national weekend newspaper over the weekend. There have been conversions through from the advertising but I'm not seeing anything in terms of traffic sources in Analytics.

Am I missing something here, or is there something to keep in mind when ascertaining traffic from this kind of source online/iPad/app advertising source?

3 Responses

Having recently worked on a campaign to be featured in the iPad app of a UK newspaper myself, hopefully I can help out here.

In my example at least I can see the data. The medium is "banner" and the source is the newspaper's website. If you go into analytics, click acquisition and all traffic - try to search first by the source. Type in your website's domain (the app might run off a different domain, so you can narrow it down by using the medium tag, or even if you click "other" -> "technology" -> and then "browser", you might see the data for Safari or other browsers associated with tablets. You can also, of course, select the "tablet and mobile" default segment in analytics to reveal any traffic.

That should hopefully reveal the traffic coming through - either directly identifiable by the source, or at least attributable to the app by looking at the "tablet and mobile" segment data during the time the ad has been running. However, I have seen in the past that this cookie data can be obfuscated or simply lost before reaching analytics - meaning the traffic is incorrectly attributed to another traffic source (usually "direct", sometimes "referral" in my experience)

To future proof this for any future campaigns, I often send the traffic from apps and campaigns such as these to their own bespoke URL, which sits off the main navigation of the site. That way I can be sure that any traffic entering the site via that URL - which you can check just by selecting "landing page" in the "other" dropdown when selecting your primary dimension - has to have come from the app. That way, we can track both traffic and conversions very accurately. If you don't want such a page to exist, you could even redirect the URL elsewhere, as analytics will still say the original URL was the first point of entry to the site. I've done this before on TV ads where the call to action asks the viewer to go to www.domain.com/tv - which just 301s to the homepage. We know therefore that visitors to this URL are TV viewers coming to the site. It's not an ideal solution however, as you'll always get people coming to the site directly without the /tv, or simply by searching for the brand name on Google. Just as an aside, I prefer TV campaigns that instruct the viewer to "search for example X" etc at the end.

Hope this helps in some way and I hope you can track that traffic data.

What I've found now is that the advertisements are linking through from the newspaper's app to the client's site BUT the site is being viewed within the app itself (like Facebook and Twitter do with their apps before allowing you to 'Open in Safari'. I completed the conversion process but even when watching in GA Real-Time while going through the conversion steps I see no activity related to the newspaper at all.

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